Overview

About Birchbox

Birchbox is changing the way consumers discover and purchase grooming, beauty, and lifestyle products. We combine a monthly subscription service with original editorial content and a fully integrated e-commerce shop. Every month, members sample high-end products targeted to fit their personal profile and behavior, learn about them through our content, and purchase full-size versions of the products they like. Our platform provides our brand partners with an innovative and efficient way to access new customers.

Birchbox launched in the Fall of 2010 and is one of the fastest growing companies in New York. We are backed by top VC firms, including Accel Partners and First Round Capital.

Birchbox is looking for experienced Software Engineers to work in our New York office. You are obsessed with delivering the best possible customer experience, value software engineering practices such as testing, and never forget about scalability and reusability when designing code.

Tech @ Birchbox

The technology team at Birchbox is responsible for development (and maintenance) of the company’s customer-facing sites (in the United States, France, the UK, and Spain), managing hosted and cloud infrastructure, and closely supporting other teams (logistics, marketing, et al.) in our 110+-person company. We work with a wide variety of open-source technologies: Debian-based servers; Chef deployments; Ruby on Rails, Java and PHP services; and Python, Perl and R scripts. The size of our team and the breadth of its responsibilities means we rely on our engineers to be self-motivated and quickly follow through on tasks without requiring close supervision. In return our engineers are given leeway to use their own initiative.

Our team spans software engineering, technical operations, product, and data science. Our challenges include:

• evolving our software and systems architecture to support a rapidly growing customer base across multiple countries and languages;
• designing and implementing the best user experience for our customers; We are striving to revolutionize online retail.
• using data, complex algorithms, and statistics, to personalize the Birchbox experience for our customers, both offline and online.

Responsibilities

You will have the opportunity to work with our team on all aspects of our technical infrastructure including:

• developing scalable backend services in key focus areas such as logistics, payments, and inventory management
• building our internal and developer APIs
• developing new user facing features for our incredibly engaged customer base across all markets
• working with our data science team to develop an infrastructure for personalization
• working with the entire team to provide a consistent, fast, and delightful, experience to our customers and partners

Requirements

• 5+ years professional software engineering experience, 2+ years web-stack
• experience developing in multiple languages including Java or C/C++ and Ruby, Python or PHP
• experience building restful services
• experience with large scale relational and non-relational databases
• you value testing and have experience with the associated tools/frameworks
• you have a solid grounding in computer science, you understand the efficiency of the code you write in terms of time and space, and you put thought into your choice of algorithms, data structures, and db schemas
• you have a thirst for new knowledge, and responsibility.  You want to own projects in their entirety, and master new problem spaces and technologies.
• you are compelled to excellence
• you are pragmatic: sometimes a beautiful solution is impermanent and expedient. You know how to make the call.
• you are persistent: it’s a job, it has some grind, you know how to dig out a solution; at the end of the day it has to ship
• you are joyful and take pride in what you do; we’re a talented and diverse crew, lucky enough to be building something people really love

Pluses

• Bachelors, Masters or PhD in Computer Science
• Startup experience
• Experience relevant to Ecommerce
• Fluency in French and/or Spanish